Dream Cultures: Explorations in the Comparative History of Dreaming

Andrew Plaks

Common Knowledge, Volume 8, Issue 1, Winter 2002, p. 212 (Review)

Published by Duke University Press

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tine commentaries, these investigations articulate the remarkably intricate ways
that medieval art could constitute profound theological arguments about the
nature of images as a reflection of Christ’s incarnation, the abrogation of the Old
COMMON KNOWLEDGE

Testament, and the relationship of copies to originals. Above all, such art offered
the possibility of viewing God through this material medium, though care was
usually taken to underscore that God could only be fully apprehended by the
intellect. Nonetheless, the power of medieval art to stimulate the (mostly learned)
faithful to the contemplation of divinity and of God’s role in sacred history is here
restored, demonstrating, like the originals under study, how Christian art could
show the invisible by means of the visible.
—Adam Cohen

David Shulman and Guy G. Stroumsa, eds., Dream Cultures:

Explorations in the Comparative History of Dreaming
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 325 pp.

The title of this fine collection of essays is not particularly promising. Its pre-
tentious pluralization of culture augurs tokenism at best and, in our darkest fears,
a morass of multiculturalism. The fuzzy feel-good subtitle about “explorations
in the comparative history” of its ephemeral subject does little to allay these fears.
But, behold, this book actually delivers what many of us have disingenuously
claimed when proposing our own symposium volume to publishers or funders as
a grand synthesis of knowledge in one field or another. It really does have an
important argument to make on the nontrivial ways in which particularistic
aspects of cultural context inform both the experience and the interpretation of
dreaming. In this collection are gathered the distinctive voices of some of the
world’s leading interpreters of culture in a chorus of erudition on a broad range
of classical, oral, and clinical “texts.” They sing individually of the meaning
assigned to dreams in traditional China, India, and Meso-America, in the ancient,
medieval, and Renaissance West, and in the linked allegorical discourse of
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. One could hardly demand from such a varied
assemblage of writings anything close to a unified perspective, much less a con-
sistent vision. Yet, taken together, they go a long way toward defining and gen-
eralizing the parameters of dream as a culturally determined expression of the
stirrings of human consciousness.
—Andrew Plaks